bluehavens | Reading

I didn't watch the Oscars, I just brought up the results afterwards on a news site. Having only seen two of the nominated films, I didn't have much stake in the outcome, but I was kind of curious.

As expected, it was a showdown between One Battle After Another and Sinners for the big prizes, and they split the two screenplay awards. Sinners is said to be a horror movie, so I'm not going to see it. No argument, no discussion, I'm just not.

I did, however, see One Battle After Another, and to my surprise I rather liked it. This is a surprise because I've seen three previous Paul Thomas Anderson movies, I didn't much like one and detested both of the others. But this one was good, and rewatchable.

The movie is in two parts, the first and shorter part taking place 16 years before the other. This part was a little hard to follow on first watching, as the characters are dumped on you before they're introduced, so it's hard to figure out what's going on and who's doing it. But on a rewatch, when you can recognize them, it's clear, especially with the help of subtitles.

Part 2, however, is crystal clear from the beginning. It is essentially one long chase scene, though as there are breaks in the storytelling and the identities of chased and chaser do sometimes change, it could be called one chase scene after another. But it felt to me like one long chase scene. But a very exciting and well-paced one as well as clearly told. It wraps up very well, too. That the father and daughter, who have been the object of most of the chasing, are finally at ease with one another by the end, so much so that they're comfortable going off and doing separate things, was particularly heart-warming.

This movie is not for everyone (I wouldn't recommend it to B.), but for what it is it's a good one.

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I wrote to Pat Murphy. I said we all liked her book, there was just one small error. She asked for more information. I sent her an explanation. Rather than being put off by this core dump, she thanked me for it and asked if she could copy my e-mail to another author who was interested. I said don't bother, I've put the whole thing online. Pass it along to anyone who's interested.

So here it is, "A Guide to Terms of Address for British Nobility." Let me know if there's anything wrong, or anything left out you think is necessary.

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A few days ago, I reviewed a performance of Aleksey Igudesman's The Music Critic. I didn't like it very much. Today, Joshua Kosman slammed it more than I did.

Like me, he noted that it's "essentially the live-music version of" Nicolas Slonimsky's book The Lexicon of Musical Invective but without any credit to Slonimsky. But Kosman would go further than I would. He says that "to imply that [Beethoven's contemporaries] were buffoons for not understanding that music on first hearing is craven nonsense." No, what they're buffoons for is ludicrously inaaccurate denunciations of it. What's fair, if you don't understand the music, is to express your wonderment and bewilderment, like Berlioz's composition teacher who said that, at the end of the concert where he first heard Beethoven's Fifth, he went to put on his hat and could not find his head.

Imagine having that reaction to this now-best-known of all classical works! That's the kind of feeling I'd like to recapture.

Igudesman's subtext is that critics are only there to complain about music they don't like. Unfortunately in Kosman's case that is often correct. He'd rather spend a review complaining about Carmina Burana than judging whether it's a good performance whether he likes the work or not. I try not to do that.

Kosman left at intermission, judging that he wouldn't be missing anything worthwhile. He didn't. I stayed till just before the end, when I finally got fed up, and I could just as well not have gone at all for anything I got out of it.

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The Adventures of Mary Darling, Pat Murphy (Tachyon, 2025)

This book does to Peter Pan what Wicked does to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: entirely deconstructs it. In this story, when the children disappear, their mother goes on a quest to find them. She's well-equipped to do so, having - it turns out - been with the Lost Boys in her youth; so was the children's father; so was Captain Hook. Captain Hook is a good guy, almost the only admirable male in the story. Peter is not a little boy who wouldn't grow up, but an entirely amoral and very dangerous though not entirely wicked spirit. That last is derivable from Barrie, but he doesn't emphasize it.

The first thing Mrs. Darling does is enlist the help of her Uncle John. That's John H. Watson, M.D., so his famous friend immediately jumps in. This book is a Sherlock Holmes story to which Holmes is entirely superfluous. He doesn't solve the mystery or do much of anything. In fact he's shown up as something of a patsy. Towards the end, there's some hasty backtracking by other characters in which they explain that Holmes is actually very talented in his limited sphere of expertise, but it is so very limited. The problem is that Holmes comes from a world with the same physical rules as our primary world, but he's stumbled into an alternate world with spirits and fairy dust in it, so his rules no longer apply but he doesn't know it.

The story actually made enjoyable reading, so where's the error? (Yes, I misspelled that deliberately above, damn you.) Murphy makes clear in the afterword that she aimed for historical accuracy in anything she didn't make up, but she made a huge clunker that fiction authors writing about British history make constantly, and that is ignorance of the nomenclature of British nobility. There's a character sometimes called Lady Hawkins and sometimes Lady Emily Hawkins. She can't be both at the same time. They mean entirely different things. "Lady" or "Lord" are not free-floating terms that can be used wherever you want. She is, like many wives of British peers at the time, an American heiress by origin, so she cannot be Lady Emily, which would make her the daughter of a high-ranking British peer, like the daughters of Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey, who are all Lady Firstname Crawley. That her husband is called both Lord Hawkins and Lord Robert Hawkins is equally impossible; if he is Lord Robert Hawkins, then his wife's proper style would be the bizarre but real Lady Robert Hawkins. (See Sayers' Busman's Honeymoon, where Harriet Vane, by now married to Lord Peter Wimsey, gives her style correctly as Lady Peter Wimsey.)

Victoria: A Life, A.N. Wilson (Penguin, 2014)

This is a readable and interesting book, so why is it filled with so many clunkers? On p. 166, Wilson says that Lord John Russell served as Foreign Secretary in the 1852 coalition headed by the Earl of Derby. No he didn't. He was Foreign Secretary in the following government, a coalition headed by the Earl of Aberdeen. Derby's government was not a coalition. Since Wilson goes on to tell us about Derby, this isn't just a glitch in name. On p. 192, Wilson says "A child was born to the marriage," but he had not told us who got married. Prince Albert died on December 14, 1861, as the text makes clear, but on p. 259, Wilson tells us that "A year on, in 1862, the Queen prepared herself for her first Christmas as a widow." Say there, Wilson, what day is Christmas?

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Where the small access street to our development meets the main artery, there's a traffic light, and the exit direction of the small access street splits into two lanes.

Therein lies the rub, because the left lane of those two is a left-turn-only lane, clearly marked with an arrow on the pavement. That leaves the right lane, which has no markings, for both going forward and turning right.

I was in my car at the front of this lane, waiting at a red light, because I was going forward. Behind me was a U-Haul truck whose driver wanted to turn right. He thought I had to turn right too - which I could have done safely, had that been my intent - and got impatient. So - since there was nobody in the left lane - he decided to go around me.

At that moment the light turned green, and - not seeing this truck pulling this dangerous maneuver - I started to move forward. And he came around and clipped me, wrecking my left headlight cover and a bunch of other stuff. So, instead of saving 3 seconds, he wasted half an hour, because that's how long it took to settle things after we pulled over.

"Why didn't you go?" he asked me.

"The light was red," I replied.

"You could have turned right safely," he said.

"I wasn't turning right. I was going forward," I replied.

"Then you should have been in the other lane," he said.

"That's a dedicated left turn lane," I replied.

He then went over and looked at it, and what he thought after seeing the arrow on the pavement - which he could easily have seen when he was behind me - I don't know.

I got very angry with him and he responded by calling the police. The cops were bemused by what was a civil dispute, not a criminal matter, and mediated our exchange of information. One of the cops advised me not to get angry, with an implication that I did so as some kind of negotiating tactic. I said I expressed anger because I was angry. He said it wasn't a big deal, insurance will cover it.

Well, it won't. I have a large deductible, my insurance doesn't cover the cost of a rental car while mine is in the shop, and that doesn't count the nuisance and fuss of dealing with all this. My usual body shop has abruptly gone out of business, to my surprise, so I had to get the insurer to find another one on their approved list. I hope the insurer agrees that I wasn't responsible for this. That the other driver tried this tight going-around maneuver in a large truck is what seemed most to impress my insurance adjuster.

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I heard an ad for this on the radio, and it sounded interesting: something called The Music Critic - ok, my latter-day profession, so I'm curious already - apparently some sort of one-man show starring John Malkovich, but at Davies, the SF Symphony hall.

It wasn't a one-man show. It was two men and an orchestra. Essentially it was a musically-illustrated version of Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective, "written and conceived" by violinist/conductor Aleksey Igudesman, who conducted the SFS in various pieces while Malkovich, miked at a music stand with his script on it, read aloud critical denunciations of the composers over (and occasionally under) the music.

Not necessarily old ones, either (Slonimsky published his Lexicon in 1953), though there were a few classics, like Tchaikovsky calling Brahms "a giftless bastard" or César Cui's description of a Rachmaninoff symphony as the product of "a conservatory in Hell." (No credit to Cui, though, or to most of the other critics, and certainly not to Slonimsky for having thought of this idea first.)

But there were also newer ones, e.g. several claims that Beethoven is a barrier to contemporary appreciation of classical music, or even that he's unappreciable by LGBTQ+ people. At one point Malkovich read negative You Tube comments on Igudesman's videos, enabling Igudesman to respond with Max Reger's famous dismissal of criticism as if he, Igudesman, had thought of it - though, as it refers to paper, it makes no sense in an online context.

At the end, the program fell apart. Igudesman coaxed Malkovich into reading critical reviews of Malkovich's own stage performances, after which Malkovich left the stage and Igudesman announced he was going to play something evidently as a quick encore, but then Malkovich came back on stage to interrupt with incoherent critiques of the way Igudesman was playing. This was supposed to be funny but was witless and annoying. The second time it happened, I just got up and left. I'd had enough.

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The late blogger Kevin Drum was under treatment for many years for multiple myeloma, which eventually killed him about a year ago. He wrote often about his medical adventures, and had particularly strong feelings about a medication he was on, a steroid named dexamethasone, which he called "the evil dex."

What exactly was evil about it he never made exactly clear, but it seems that it prevented him from sleeping, leaving him groggy all the time.

I do not have myeloma, but I have been taking intermittent courses of dexamethasone - one to four days each - and have to report differently. It doesn't seem to have caused any disruption in my sleep, which has actually been getting less disrupted lately, and though that may be because I was taking the dex in the mornings, I've had it in the afternoons with no further effect.

What it does cause is a spike in blood sugar, which has to be watched over carefully. And either it or some of the other medications I've been taking at the same time has been causing constipation, about which the less said the better.

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At Corflu, where the banquet was catered at our hotel meeting room from a Puerto Rican restaurant nearby, I was pretty sure I'd been to that restaurant before. Having gotten home, I went to leave a review on Yelp and discovered that not only had I been there (nine years ago, a wonder I remembered it) but I'd reviewed it.

Had I checked my review, I could have been definite on something I was trying vaguely to recall during conversations at the banquet. The food line offered two kinds of plantains, green and sweet. What I recalled was getting a mixture and liking one but not the other, but I couldn't remember which one. Turned out that what I'd written back then was, "The fried green plantains were fairly dry and crunchy, the sweet ones far too intensely sweet and got over anything they touched."

That was in contrast to general opinion at the banquet, which is that the green ones were inedible while the sweet ones were quite good. (I didn't have either this time.)